Urban sprawl

To traffic hell and back

LONG before Vice-President Al Gore stumbled on the idea, Atlantans recognised the perils of suburban sprawl. They are driving themselves crazy, and they know it. The traffic problem was desperate a decade ago; now it is even worse. The city's average commuter drives 34 miles a day, more even than his peer in Los Angeles, and “rush hour” lasts all day. Babies have been born in the impenetrable jams that make some desperate motorists leave their cars to relieve themselves behind roadside bushes. The crush can lead to road-rage explosions in which guns are drawn and even fired. And attempting to leave your car may be even more difficult. Downtown shops such as Harry's in a Hurry, which provides fresh and prepared gourmet foods to the perpetually impatient, hire off-duty policemen to stop the traffic so that upscale drivers of spotless sports utility vehicles can manoeuvre in and out of the car park.

Yet people still take to the roads because they know that, in a city shaped by the car, driving is just about the only way of getting around. In the past 30 years the population of the metropolitan area has doubled, to more than 3m; zoning regulations have created vast residential communities far away from offices and shopping areas and largely without the bus and light-rail routes that could get people to them. Between 1990 and 1994, Atlanta added freeways and arterial roads at a faster pace than any of the other top 50 urban areas in the United States. Driving is also ludicrously cheap: Atlantans paid less than a dollar a gallon for their petrol last year. When it comes to ground-level ozone pollution (most of which emanates from cars), the city is one of the country's worst offenders.

Until recently, the area's politicians have been at odds over what to do. All sorts of things have been attempted: new roads, high-occupancy vehicle lanes, a Highway Emergency Roadside Operation (HERO) to get disabled vehicles quickly off the road. Officials have exhorted people to move to the centre of town and, failing that, have tried at least to get them to use MARTA, the city's light-rail link. MARTA is an impressive system as far as it goes, and rider-figures for the fiscal year just ending are expected to be 84m. But it famously does not go where people want to go, it has too few stations, and the fares (though a mere $1.50 for most single trips) compare badly with the present price of petrol. As one Atlantan all-too-typically concludes, “Why not just drive there and listen to the radio?”

The biggest problem, though, is that any ideas for coping with sprawl have always run up against local politics, racial tensions, history and, not least, geography. Georgia is made up of a large number of tiny counties: the Atlanta metro area contains 13 of them, and the extended metro area no fewer than 20. These cling to their political autonomy, which, as they see it, includes total control over local transport. Race complicates the picture. Because the metro area's population is 26% black, the whiter counties have long avoided anything that might bring them any closer to the black core. That is the real reason why links to MARTA (which was said in its early days to stand for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”) have been resisted and why, even in a much more tolerant city, people in the outlying suburbs stick doggedly to their cars.

Now, however, the city has run up against a federal road block. Under the Clean Air Act, Atlanta was told last year that it would get no more federal road money until it came up with a transport plan that cut air pollution. Suddenly, the old issues of race and local control seemed less pressing, and co-operation between city and suburbs more appealing.

Last autumn a committee of business leaders, including Atlanta's mayor, Bill Campbell, and some of the city's biggest developers, presented the newly elected Democratic governor, Roy Barnes, with the Metro Atlanta Transportation Initiative. This included the bold notion of a regional transport authority, an idea bound to stir up old rivalries; but the businessmen were willing to offer the governor political cover in exchange for his support.

As it turned out, none was necessary. Mr Barnes—perhaps because he had campaigned on the issue of suburban sprawl, perhaps because he comes from Cobb County and is already familiar with a hellish commute—backed the idea enthusiastically, even coming up with his own version. Public opinion favoured the plan, too; everyone is against sprawl in Atlanta these days. The expected political opposition evaporated, and on March 30th the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) was overwhelmingly approved by the legislature.

The bill gives Mr Barnes powers other governors can only dream of. He is in charge of appointing the 15 members of an agency with sweeping authority over all transport projects in the metro area. The GRTA has the power to finance and operate public transport; it can impose the transport plans it favours, even in defiance of the state Department of Transportation; it can require local governments to finance those plans (under threat of taking away their state money if they refuse); it can veto major projects, such as malls, in the 13 counties the agency covers. Its first project may be the building of a light-rail link in the northern suburbs, presumably to help the governor's commute.

At least, those are its powers on paper. Exactly how much it will achieve is impossible to guess. It may be that Atlanta has already sprawled so far that it can never become a compact, pedestrian-friendly, quasi-European city of the sort American developers increasingly seem to yearn for. Once a city has sold its soul to the car, it is probably too late to get it back. But at least Atlanta is trying, and that is a start.